Tag: writing

Peeve of the Day

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I don’t like novels or short stories where the author deliberately withholds stuff from the reader.

I’m not talking about mysteries, where part of the fun is in the puzzle and in the timing of the revelations; also, part of the thematic point of most mystery novels — even more than questions of innocence and guilt and justice — is the revelation of truth.  I’m talking about stories where there is something significant about one of the characters, or about some aspect of the general milieu of the story, or about the resolution, that the author clearly knows but doesn’t choose to tell, instead toying with the reveal like a fan dancer in the burlesque.

Stories where the gender of the main character or first person narrator is kept hidden — especially if it’s revealed, gotcha!-fashion, at the end — are a particular irritant as far as I’m concerned.  This, I will admit, is mostly a matter of personal taste, since I have known discriminating readers for whom such stories were like catnip to a Siamese.  And it’s not even an absolute thing with me; I’m quite fond of the mystery novels of the late Sarah Caudwell, who never did reveal the gender of their first-person narrator, Professor Hilary Tamar.  (I always pictured Professor Tamar as looking rather like an anthropomorphic sheep as drawn by Sir John Tenniel for a missing scene from Alice in Wonderland . . . in the absence of data, the human mind does strange things.)  But Caudwell is a case of good writing plus good story trumping almost everything else; but a story that isn’t top-notch in both those areas is going to lose me before it goes very far.

Almost as irritating, where I’m concerned, are stories where the resolution is left open, in “The Lady or the Tiger” fashion, especially when the story seems to be offering the reader a deliberate ambiguity in order to establish some sort of literary street cred.  Again, some people find endings like that to be right down their alley; I’m just not one of them.  Instead, such endings make me cranky and resentful, because I always suspect in my heart that the author knows the true ending and is deliberately holding out on me — I think it’s because, as a writer, I can’t imagine not knowing the true ending of something I’ve written.

The moral of the story, if there is one:  Don’t ever be accidentally ambiguous.  If you’re going to do it, do it on purpose, in the full awareness that you’re probably going to lose some of your audience that way, and in the firm belief that whatever you’re trying to do or say with your story is worth the risk.

Dash It All!

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Where would writers be without the helpful em-dash?†

A dash, the style manuals helpfully state, indicates a break in the sentence, or (as part of a pair) encloses a parenthetical statement.  In practice, this makes the dash an informal replacement for several other pieces of punctuation:  parentheses, the colon, the semicolon, even ellipses.

It’s the protean nature of the dash that presents the greatest hazard.  Being so useful in a variety of different situations, it’s vulnerable to overuse.  A writer who isn’t careful can end up with a page full of dash-filled sentences, which lends a sort of panting urgency to the prose that usually isn’t wanted.  The best general advice I ever read on the subject was a stricture I encountered in a media fanzine back in the pre-internet era, and it ran something like this:  “If you use more than two dashes in one paragraph, you aren’t allowed to use any at all in the next.  So there.”‡

There’s a higher-level version of the same problem, involving semicolons.  There are some writers — I plead guilty here — who like semicolons entirely too much.  If I’m not careful, I can find myself committing a three-sentence paragraph where all three sentences feature independent clauses joined together by semicolons.  At that point, I have to force myself to take an axe to at least two of those sentences and break them back up into their component clauses.

Sometimes, though, I cheat, and replace one of the semicolons with a dash instead.

†There’s also a shorter version, the en-dash, but its uses are much more restricted and frankly, if you use a hyphen nobody’s going to call you on it. Well, maybe the typesetter, but unless you’re being your own desktop publisher, you aren’t likely to ever meet him or her.

‡I believe the zine reviewer in question was noted Star Trek fan Paula Block, but at this remove I can’t be sure. Whoever it was, I owe her for the words of wisdom.

So Today was a Short Story Day

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We’re about two drafts in on what will probably be a three or four draft story.

The thing about short stories is that they don’t leave you any room for error.  If a novel is like cruising along in a jetliner at 30,000 feet, a short story is like flying a WWI biplane at treetop level without a parachute.  One mistake, and you’re toast.

This is why I keep telling people that writing a novel is a lot easier than writing a short story — it just takes longer.

Tales from the Before Time, Round Two

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All writers have a few horror stories to tell.  This is one of ours.

It happened quite a while ago, back when one of the ways that young (or youngish, anyhow) freelance novelists made their grocery money was by writing work-for-hire YA series novels for book packagers.  The way the process usually worked was like this:  a book packager would come up with an idea for a six-book series — I’m still not sure why six was usually the magic number — and sell it to a publisher.  Then the book packager would find one or two or even six hungry writers to write the individual volumes, based on a series bible created by the packager.  The deadlines were usually short, the pay was usually low, the royalties were in almost all cases nonexistent, and the series bibles were either laughably nonspecific or so nitpicking as to be ridiculous.

But groceries have to be bought, so there we were.

We’d written the second book in a YA series which shall remain nameless, and I flatter myself that we’d actually done a pretty good job working within the constraints of the project.  We’d finished the manuscript and turned it in; we’d done the necessary revisions; we’d gotten back the copyedited manuscript and gone over it and turned it back in; we’d gone over the galleys and sent them back in; and as far as we knew, we were done.  So we packed up the mini-van and went down to New York for a few days to visit my husband and coauthor’s old family homestead — and returned to find an “attempted delivery” FedEx notice on our front door and a “Call me right now!” message on our answering machine from our editor at the book packager.

What had happened while we were away:  The cover flats for the novels in the series had come back from the printer  (in packager-land, in those days, the covers were often printed before the novels were even written), and only then did the editor discover that the graphic designer had made the spine of the novel too small for the contracted word length of the novels in the series.  Reprinting the covers was out of the question — too time-consuming and too expensive.  Instead, each of the novels in the series was going to have to lose 10,000 typeset words.

We were lucky.  We got a copy of the galleys (that was the FedEx package), and I got to go through it removing single words and parts of sentences with a pair of tweezers sharp red pencil while keeping a running count of the total on a handy scratchpad, which meant that by the time I was finished, the novel — while considerably attenuated — at least still made sense.  The first novel in the series had entire paragraphs and even whole scenes removed with a hatchet by the editor, because it was scheduled to go to the printers the very next day.

(Before you ask:  I don’t know what happened to the graphic designer.  But I do know that it always pays to be nice to the publisher’s art department, because if they decide that they don’t like you, they have it in their power to do dreadful things.)

An Underutilized Plot Resource

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 3 Comments

The story is never about the middle kid.  The eldest gets to be the heir, or sometimes the lost heir, or occasionally the bully or the man in charge or the villainous oppressor (or the mimetic-realism equivalents of the above.)  The youngest is the bold one who goes out into the world to find his fortune, or the virtuous and kindly one who wins while the older siblings are undone by their own unpleasantness, or sometimes the mysteriously adopted foundling or the one with special powers.

But nobody ever tells a story about the middle kid.

This is a law of storytelling that could, under the right circumstances, be profitably broken.  But it would take work.  A novel of mimetic realism would want to make itself into a family problem novel about the angst and trials of being a middle kid; a fantasy novel would want to deliberately subvert the archetype.  Novels in other genres would want to handle the problem by thrusting the protagonist’s family so far into the background that he might as well have sprung fully-formed from the brow of the CIA, or the USMC, or the NYPD, or the faculty of Harvard Law.

The last-named case moves us over into “action heroes don’t have families” territory — which is a profoundly unrealistic motif.  But nobody wants to think about the noir-story LA private eye with his trench coat and his fedora and his world-weary outlook going back home to Toledo, Ohio, for Thanksgiving, where he spends a long weekend not as the owner and sole operative of AAA Investigations Incorporated, but as Joey the middle kid who gets ribbed by his siblings for showing up looking like a poser on TV and whose mother wants to know if he’s met any nice girls yet out there in California.  After four days of this, murder and palm trees and brutal cops and corrupt city officials start looking really good.

Writing an ordinary family with no more than the normal amount of inter-sibling and parent-child conflict can be hard work.  It’s no wonder, really, that so many writers resort to making their protagonists orphans, or to giving them dysfunctional families that they don’t talk to any more.  But it does leave a lot of open territory out there, just waiting to be explored.

Character Types to Avoid

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While you’re stocking your plot with characters (or, if you work the other way around, while you’re assembling the cast of characters who will generate your plot), there are some types you want to steer clear of because they will  lose reader sympathy — not just for themselves, but for any characters who happen to be standing too close to them.

One is The Annoyingly Perfect Character.  This character is good at everything, and is always on the right side of any issue — no matter what the normal side may be for his time and place.  Dogs always like him.  He can drive a stick shift without ever stalling at a busy intersection.  He can cook an intimate dinner for two and not have the kitchen stacked full of unwashed pots and pans at the end of the evening.  If the character is female, she can do all of these things and run a Fortune 500 company without ever chipping her fingernail polish.

Another is The Character Who Wins All the Arguments.  This usually happens because he or she is also The Character Who Agrees With The Author.  Readers get annoyed by this one in a hurry, especially when they start thinking that the author is deliberately setting the character up with debate partners who aren’t exactly the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree.  (Yes, Robert A. Heinlein, I’m looking at you.)  If you’re going to be writing a debate, remember that even the wrong side is likely to have one or two good arguments going for them — be fair, and let them have those two measly points before your highly principled hero crushes them under the weight of a dozen stronger ones.

And a third is The Character Who Can’t Get a Break.  This is the guy (or gal) for whom the line “if it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all” might have been written.  If he has a job, he will lose it.  If he gets a job, it will be in a sweatshop, or a soul-destroying cubicle farm, or a seething office morass of backstabbing and bureaucratic corruption.   His significant other will cheat on him; or, if faithful, will contract a lingering and expensive malady that will cause him to turn to a life of incompetent crime in order to afford the treatments.  He will leave his only umbrella on the bus.  The reader will begin to suspect that the author hates this character, and will secretly despise the character for putting up with such unfair treatment.

Don’t write these characters.  Your readers will be grateful for it.

Longest Night

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At least, here in the Eastern Standard time zone of the USA, it’s the longest.

A fit night for going back and inserting necessary scenes into the manuscript so that a new development in the middle will make sense.

Gentlewriters, Start Your Engines

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

It’s the 20th of December 2012, which means it’s time for a reminder that applications for Viable Paradise XVII open up on 1 January 2013.  Guidelines and further details can be found at the VP web page.

Viable Paradise is a one-week workshop focusing on fantasy and science fiction, held annually in the autumn on the New England island of Martha’s Vineyard.  A couple of pictures, below the fold:

Continue reading “Gentlewriters, Start Your Engines” →

A Pitfall for the Unwary

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One of the bits of advice given to fledgling writers in the current era is “the spellchecker is your friend.”

Like a lot of advice-for-writers, this advice is both true and not-true.  Or, to put it another way, the spellchecker is your friend, but it’s not your best friend.  It’s the friend who’s fun to be with and helpful on the easy stuff, but who’s nowhere in sight when you’ve got a lot of heavy lifting to do, or the one who’s got your back right up to the point where they run off with your prom date.

A spellchecker will catch your typos, and it will catch your misspellings . . . but only so long as the typos and misspellings aren’t also legitimate words in your spellchecker’s language-of-choice.  It won’t do you a bit of good with the its/it’s problem, or the to/two/too problem, or the there/their/they’re problem, or any of those fatally similar and easily confused homonyms.  It won’t remind you to put apostrophes in your possessives, and it won’t catch embarrassing stuff like pubic for public or untied for united.

As for your characters’ names, or for any terminology coined especially for the story you’re working on . . . unless you remember to add those words to the spellchecker’s user dictionary, it’s not going to keep you from messing those up either.  And heaven help you if you accidentally add a wrong spelling to the user dictionary, because getting in there and taking it out again is not something most word processors tend to make easy.

The sad  fact is that spellchecker or no spellchecker, there’s still no substitute for going over your manuscript by hand and eye before sending it out.

Snow, Still.

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But at least I’m no longer quite so peevish.  Snow that looks like it’ll stick around instead of melting and then refreezing into sheets of ice is good.  A large part of what passes for the local economy up here runs on winter tourism, especially snowmobilers, and last year’s lack of heavy snowfall was devastating.

Meanwhile, I chase the words “THE END” on the current deadline like Achilles trying to catch that blasted tortoise.